


Maybe Size Doesn't Really Matter

by justanothersong



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe, Because it's funny that's why, F/M, Human Castiel, Humor, M/M, Making it up As I Go Along, Tumblr Prompt, Witchcraft, crowley is a dog
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-03-20
Updated: 2015-04-15
Packaged: 2018-03-18 18:19:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 15,350
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3579291
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/justanothersong/pseuds/justanothersong
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Crowley is a pug, Ruby is a witch, Dean is a Ken doll, and Castiel needs to get out more.</p><p>Based on an AU prompt by: <a href="http://tea-and-outer-space.tumblr.com/post/99399784683/aus">tea-and-outer-space on Tumblr</a>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

For roughly twenty or so of DeanWinchester’s thirty-two years on earth, he did not believe in witches. There were the first couple, when his little mind was too undeveloped to comprehend the concept (and too busy learning about more important things, like walking and talking and eating a spoonful of mashed peas without stabbing himself in the eye), and once he hit about nine or ten, he decided he was too grown up to believe the silly, scary little tales his father spun over campfires and on dark and stormy Halloween nights.

Witches weren’t real. Neither were vampires, werewolves, wendigo, ghosts, demons, djinn, skinwalkers, or rugaru (whatever the hell those were supposed to be anyway). As far as Dean was concerned, he just had a weird and mildly overprotective dad who made up stories about creepy things that went bump in the night to frighten his children into sticking close to home, and that much, Dean understood. He didn’t remember much of his mother, who died when he was only four years old, but the loss had hit his father heavily and the man clung to his two young boys, Dean and his baby brother Sam, in order to keep himself grounded.

It was little wonder he would find his own strange little ways to keep them in line, right?

And then the bottom dropped out of Dean’s world entirely.

 

It wasn’t long before his thirtieth birthday that Ruby Janus moved into the recently vacated apartment one floor down from Dean in a three-flat in the city. She was pretty and spritely, with long wavy dark hair, a petite figure, and eyes bright and full of laughter – at least she was when Dean’s younger brother Sam was around. She smiled and flirted, found reasons to show up at Dean’s door whenever Sam was visiting, and always had an excuse to have her hands on him, plucking invisible lint from his shoulder, touching his arm to get his attention and letting her fingers linger there, or simply sitting too close on the leather sofa when Sam inevitably invited her inside, much to Dean’s chagrin. 

When Sam wasn’t around, Ruby was a heinous bitch. She blasted (terrible) music at all hours, bust most often during the time of day she knew Dean was trying to sleep, as to be up and ready for his early morning days on his job site, where he worked as an electrical engineer. She let her yappy little pug, Crowley, crap all over the front lawn and never bothered to clean it up, even when the animal aimed for the front walk and Dean would inevitably find himself scrubbing his work boots over the toilet. Dean’s Sunday newspaper would disappear from the front stoop before he could retrieve it, only to land with a suspiciously loud bang on his doormat with the coupons half-clipped and the funny pages missing, often with a mocking dark lipstick kiss on the face of whoever appeared in the headline photo.

And though he had no proof, Dean was almost positive that the disappearance of their neighbor’s cat, a large and broody fluffball named Uriel that was owned by the writer, Chuck, who lived in the basement apartment, was directly related to the cat’s penchant for pissing on Ruby’s doormat.

All in all, Dean was certain she had a few screws loose, and he didn’t want her getting her grimy claws into his kid brother. 

He mentioned as much to her. Repeatedly. And Ruby would smile coyly, try pinching his cheeks with brightly painted nails, and coo that it wasn’t really his decision, now was it? That much was admittedly true; Dean had been hesitant to broach the topic with Sam, as the younger man habitually became defensive if Dean got too mother-hen with him, and had been working the other side, trying to keep Ruby away. For his part, Sam seemed rather smitten, and it worried his older brother.

 

It came to a head late one night when Dean had just crawled into bed and the loud whining tone of Chuck’s car alarm began sounding, directly following a disturbingly loud crunching noise. Chuck drove an old Neon – or at least Dean thought that’s what it had once been, as in recent days it looked more like four or five different 90’s-era sedans cobbled together into a singular clunking rustbucket. Dean liked Chuck well enough but the other man’s car was hardly his concern; he was more focused on the fact that he had parked directly behind Chuck on the street in front of their building.

If there was anything in his life that Dean cherished outside of his family, it was his 1967 Chevy Impala. He kept his baby in pristine condition; he wouldn’t even eat inside until he was certain he had mastered the art of dropping not so much as a crumb. Whatever made Chuck’s monstrosity spring to life had to have come dangerously close to the Impala, and that sent Dean running for the door.

Ruby was standing outside of her own idling car, some ice blue import that Dean hated on principle, laughing and stumbling in the light of a street lamp. She was clearly returning from a night out, dressed to the nines in spiked heels and a short black dress, but bearing the sloppy unkempt look of someone who’d had just a bit too much to drink. When she saw Dean barreling out the front door of their building in his boxers and a t-shirt, she started laughing even harder. Chuck was just behind him, still tying the knot in his bathrobe, chirping off his car alarm after he was finished.

“You have got to be fucking kidding me,” Dean growled, running to inspect his car. The pieces of metal and glass on the asphalt, glittering in the streetlamp’s glow, did not bode well for his baby. Getting a good look at the damage, Dean was fuming. “You have GOT to be fucking KIDDING me!” he repeated.

Ruby was still laughing, holding her hands up in the air in surrender. “It was an accident, swear to god,” she said, shaking her head. “Seriously, I couldn’t have done this better if I tried!”

It looked as though she had taken the turn onto their street too fast and not straightened her wheel in time, just about t-boning the Impala and Chuck’s rustbucket at the exact point where Chuck’s bumper ended and the Impala began. It was hard to tell if there was any new damage to Chuck’s car – Dean had offered his services to try and do something about its appearance, but Chuck had been adamant that even a carwash could break it into pieces if it were too harsh – but it was clear that Dean’s baby had suffered. The driver’s side headlight was completely busted out, the grill badly dented, and Dean didn’t even see the headline panel; the front trim was shot and the bumper was dented. Even if he bought new manufacture replacement parts – something he’d have to be desperate to do – combined with the work and the time, the cost would be sky high. Sourcing original parts could take months, and with the weather still cold, streets still coated with road salt, and the constant threat of new snowfall, there was a good chance rust would set in before he got anything done.

Dean had never in his life raised a hand to a woman but in that moment he was sorely tempted. 

Chuck had wandered over to his own car and sighed, running a hand through his messy dark hair before shoving both into the pockets of his ratty bathrobe. He frowned at what must have been a new dent, something only he could spot.

“Ah, cripes,” he grumbled, and kicked his back tire in annoyance. The alarm sprang to life again, startling him 

Still giggling to herself, Ruby stumbled back to her car and managed to pull into a spot across the street, jumping the curve and leaving the tail end of her car sticking too far into traffic. She didn’t seem to care, walking nonchalantly towards the door of their building, a small purse on a short chain strap dangling from one hand, her keys from the other.

“Are you drunk?” Dean demanded. “You’re fucking drunk, aren’t you? I’m callin’ the cops!”

Ruby turned as he spoke, ambling back towards him with a crooked gait and a wide smile. With her heels on she was just tall enough to stretch up towards Dean’s lips in a gesture suggesting a kiss, only to grin and say, “Point-oh-seven, bitch,” and waved a miniature breathalyzer attached to her keychain in his face before she turned and swaggered home.

From that moment on, it was all out war.


	2. Chapter 2

Dean tried leaning on their landlady, Mrs. Tran, to get Ruby’s lease pulled, or at least make sure it wasn’t renewed. He pressed the point that she didn’t clean up after her dog and that she had caused a commotion in the neighborhood late at night that would reflect poorly on the property owner.

“She pays her rent on time and no one else has complained,” Mrs. Tran had responded with a shrug. 

When Dean wouldn’t let it go, Mrs. Tran stopped answering his calls and sent her teenage son, Kevin, to pick up rent checks on his way home from school. Dean tried to win the kid over to his side, but the boy seemed mostly just uncomfortable with Dean’s complaints and blushed and babbled when Ruby passed by and winked at him.

At least, Dean thought, he could keep Sam out of her clutches, so he made it a point to no longer invite his brother over, choosing to meet up at diners and bars far outside of the neighborhood rather than bring Sam anywhere near the harpy. That worked for only so long, as Sam, apparently still interested in carrying on his flirtation with the woman downstairs, started showing up without being asked.

After catching them standing a little too close for comfort in the downstairs hallway, Dean had finally had enough. He shooed Sam upstairs, ostensibly to check on the chili that Dean had cooking, and turned on Ruby as soon as Sam was out of earshot.

“I’ve been keepin’ my mouth shut, tryin’ to let Sammy see you for what you are, but I’m done,” he warned her.

“Aww, Sammy’s a big boy Dean,” Ruby purred in response. “I think he can make up his own mind.”

“You think so?” Dean replied. “After I tell him I saw you wearin’ the bracelet we ordered our Aunt Ellen for Mother’s Day, that mysteriously never showed up in the mail?”

Ruby glared. “You’d better keep your mouth shut, Winchester.”

Dean rolled his eyes. “Piss off, Ruby. And start cleaning up after your fucking dog,” he replied, and headed up the stairs to his own apartment.

 

Sam didn’t believe him, of course, because the younger man was about as stubborn as he was tall, and he stood a few inches above Dean himself, who was well over six feet tall. It devolved into a shouting match, with Sam reminding Dean time and again that he was 26 years old and damn well capable of making his own decisions about his life, which led to Dean rolling his eyes and responding with an all too sarcastic, “Okay, Samantha”.

Which in turn led to Sam stomping out the door.

All of this Dean had expected; he knew his little brother about as well as he knew himself, growing up in a cramped apartment and playing caretaker when his father put in long hours at the garage. Sam would be angry, feel as though Dean were trying to run his life, and he leave to seethe about it for a few days. But it wouldn’t be long before he would feel guilty about leaving the way he did and show up all sheepish, and actually start listening to reason.

It was a pattern with the kid.

The problem was that Ruby hadn’t heard the argument, too aggravated with the elder Winchester brother to do much but blast some nu metal and break a few dinner plates. She spied Sam’s angry exit through her living room window when she was just beginning to wind down her own fury, thought it was his reaction to hearing (and believing) the truth, and that restarted the whole rage.

Only this time, Ruby didn’t crank up her stereo and take out her anger on her tableware. This time, Ruby got out her grimoire. 

 

Dean had, on more than one occasion, referred to his downstairs neighbor as a bitch, never knowing that he was but one letter off. For all of her feigned sweetness to Sam and fluttered eyelashes to anyone who might suspect, the duplicitous nature that Dean had spotted ran far deeper than even he realized. 

Ruby had been playing at dark magic for years.

When all of her little friends had been obsessed with The Craft, running around, calling corners, pretending that they were real live witches, Ruby began searching out paths towards the real thing. A few friends made in hole-in-the-wall ‘new age’ stores, a few scraps of spellwork found tucked in the back of old books in a use book shop, and she was well on her way towards an exciting career in the dark arts.

She had been writing her own spells by the time she was seventeen; at nineteen, she could perform simple spells with a gesture or a thought. Grown and moved away from home, Ruby was an accomplished witch who used her magic to buy and sell power, and get just about whatever she wanted, leaving an impressive body count in her wake with no one the wiser.

And now, she was pissed.

 

Sundays were mostly lazy for Dean. He never worked on a Sunday if he could help it, and relished not having to set an alarm. He’d sleep late, curled around his pillow, then spend the day in his shorts, marathoning films on his television or blowing through a paperback or two. It was a little after ten when he wandered out of his bedroom, set on making himself a decent breakfast for a change: eggs, bacon, toast… he thought he might even have some orange juice in the fridge, a far cry from his usual routine of grabbing coffee and a donut on his way to the job site. What he didn’t expect, however, was to find the witch from downstairs standing in his kitchen with a smile on her face.

He’d only gotten out “What the fu…” when she whispered a word in a language he couldn’t place and blew a handful of some sort of powder into his face. His eyes had begun to itch immediately and the strange substance, which he was certain landed on his skin dry, began to drip down like liquid. The next thing he knew it was lights out, with Ruby’s laughter ringing in his ears. 

 

When he woke, he knew he was still in his kitchen, but something seemed wrong. Everything seemed much larger than it should be and he felt cold and confused. He had barely gotten to his feet when he realized that Ruby was looming over him and he stumbled backwards, landing against something cool and metal.

He realized with cold shock that he was completely nude, but had no time to react; the cool metal structure that had been his landing pad was his stainless steel toaster. He was standing on his kitchen counter, bare ass naked, and half the size of a Ken doll.

Thankfully, he was still anatomically correct, but he had no time to celebrate that small victory.

“Aww,” Ruby’s voice lilted above him. “Poor little Dean,” she crooned. “Didn’t I tell you to keep your mouth shut? Now look what you made me do.”

Dean didn’t respond. He couldn’t. His mind was spinning; this had to be a bad dream, some kid of hallucination. Maybe whatever she had blown in his face had been some kind of drug, something to send him on a bad trip. Maybe that was her plan all along, get him good and stone, then call in the cavalry to find him, make them believe he was an addict.

It was the only thing that could make sense. Or at least that is what he tried to tell himself.

For all of his shock and horror, Dean was still grounded in reality. He could feel the smooth granite of his kitchen countertops beneath his feet, see Ruby smiling down at him, hear the usual Sunday morning sounds that he was well use to: birds outside the window, Ruby’s dog yapping at them a floor below. He could even see the pile of his clothes on the kitchen floor, far too large for him now, sitting there puddled where he had fallen.

“You should have known better than to get in my way,” Ruby went on, turning a moment and opening his refrigerator, retrieving a pound of ground beef he had been intent on turning into hamburgers for dinner that night. “See, I always get what I want. No matter what it takes,” she went on.

Dean said nothing, only stared and listened, watching as she pulled the cellophane packaging off of the meat and pulled a bloody lump of it barehanded from its foam plate. She held it aloft for Dean to see and grinned, reaching with her free hand to flip the switch just beside his kitchen sink.

The roar of the garbage disposal made Dean jump back a few inches, even though he was still a respectable distance away from the stainless steel sink basin. Ruby was still smiling as she dropped the lump of meat down the drain trap and into the whirring blades of the garbage disposal, turning on the faucet to help the wad of raw beef course through the kitchen pipes after it had been chewed down to pulp by the disposal.

“Thought you might like a preview of what’s going to happen to you, Dean,” Ruby intoned. 

Dean felt the sinking horror of what she was implying seep down to his bones, watching as Ruby dropped another bloody handful of raw beef into the disposal and it chewed it down to bits. If he slipped down the drain, there’d been nothing left of him at all at this size; his bones would be broken down to shards and chips, completely unrecognizable as human.

It seemed his downstairs neighbor was just set to send Dean down the drain as well when a pounding came at his apartment door.

“Dean!” the familiar voice of his brother called. “C’mon man, open up, I know you’re home.” It seemed the younger Winchester had been more bothered by their argument than he had let on, and was there already to try and patch things up.

Ruby swore under her breath; Sam had a key to Dean’s apartment and would most likely use it if he thought his brother was ignoring him, and she couldn’t be found there alone. Annoyed that she couldn’t savor the kill but not willing to risk implicating herself in anything untoward, she knocked Dean into the sink with the back of her hand and grabbed at kitchen towel to quickly swipe at anything she might have touched.

When she glanced back into the drain, all she saw was the blood from her grisly ground beef display; assuming her work done, she quickly flipped off the disposal and turned off the faucet, scrubbing her fingerprints away as soon as she did. With a final sigh of disappoint, she turned and walked away, drifting into nothing and disappearing entirely.

She never saw Dean hiding beneath a few dirty dishes he had left in the sink basin the night before, cold and frightened, wondering how in the hell he was going to get out of this mess.


	3. Chapter 3

It could never be said that Castiel Chariton was a superstitious man. When he spotted an ad for a reasonably priced apartment within a well-kept neighborhood, he had placed a call to see the place immediately, and didn’t mind at all when a grungy man in a bathrobe – presumably a prospective neighbor – advised that the last man who lived there had disappeared without a trace just four months prior.

“It’s some pretty freaky stuff,” the man had intoned. “His wallet and car keys and everything were still in there but his clothes were on the kitchen floor and there was a bunch of beef blood in the sink. No one knows what happened to him.”

Castiel had given the man a polite smile, trying to ignore what had to be a few days’ worth of stubble and the crust of what he thought might have been egg yolk at the corner of the man’s mouth.

“Sometimes people just need a change,” Castiel offered.

The man in the bathrobe shook his head. “Not this guy. His family doesn’t even know what happened to him, he just dropped off the grid. Plus, he never would have left his car.”

Castiel had nodded, given the man another polite smile, and inched away to wait for his (hopefully) new landlady in the building’s small front hall; a lesser man might have been put off on taking the place based on the bathrobed man’s appearance alone, not to mention the strange tale he had spun, but Castiel wasn’t much one to be bothered.

“Don’t listen to Chuck!” Mrs. Tran, the building’s owner, had said the moment she arrived. A middle aged Asian woman with a short soccer mom haircut and a steely expression, she made it clear by her demeanor that she was a no-nonsense kind of woman, and Chuck, presumably the bathrobe man, skittered away as soon as she walked in the door.

“I’m sorry?” Castiel replied, startled by her greeting.

Mrs. Tran sighed and pinched the bridge of her nose. “Chuck – Mr. Shurley – is a very good tenant and a very good neighbor. However, he is a writer and has a very active imagination. I’m sure he’s mentioned the second floor apartment’s former tenant, Mr. Winchester, who left rather abruptly.” She sighed again. “My only concern is that he broke his lease. The apartment was left clean, and nothing untoward was ever found inside, so there’s nothing to be concerned about, is that clear?”

Castiel gulped, forcefully reminded of his gruff, cruel-to-be-kind Aunt Naomi by Mrs. Tran’s brusque manner. “Of course,” he agreed quickly. “I’d really like to just see the place, I’m on a month to month lease right now and I’d prefer not to renew.”

‘Prefer’ being an understatement; if Castiel had to spend another month living across the hall from a woman who seemed to think God himself had brought them together, he would lose it. Daphne had been very nice when he moved in but had grown clinging and cloying all too quickly, showing up at his door at odd hours and telling their neighbors that it was only a matter of time before she’d be moving across the hall to share his apartment.

Castiel had tried to let her down gently, but Daphne could not be dissuaded, and short of getting a restraining order – what he felt to be a drastic measure he really did not want to take – finding a new place to live seemed his best option.

After all, he hated the large impersonal building with its tiny mailboxes and lack of any green space outside. Mrs. Tran’s three-flat had a large backyard that was free to use for all residents of the building and she had mentioned in their initial phone conversation that Castiel was absolutely welcome to portion off a small area to use as a garden.

He knew he would have passed Mrs. Tran’s background and credit checks, so as long as there were no body outlines on the floor or roaches waging war on the kitchen, he was ready to throw a sleeping bag on the floor and move in that night.

The place was spotless, hardwood floors throughout and the tang of a lemon-scented cleaner still hanging in the air. The entry came in alongside an open plan kitchen that had a half-wall separating it from the main living space; there was a bathroom and two bedrooms off the main area and a small wrought iron balcony that would be perfect for a few potted plants and Castiel’s telescope. 

One look at the pristine bathroom lined in white subway tile, and Castiel was reaching into his coat pocket for his checkbook.

 

Dean was glad that someone new was moving in. The apartment had been vacant for two months, since Sam and John Winchester had moved all of Dean’s things into storage, and the quiet had been getting to him. Not to mention his concerns over food.

For all of his faults, Dean wasn’t a stupid man. It had taken a few days for the reality of his situation to settle in and after that, he had switched over to survival mode. He knew there was no one he could go to for help – if he could, in fact, even ‘go’ anymore, which he clearly could not. His world had become limited to his old apartment and he had to make his peace with that; venturing out of doors was not possible, not when he was dwarfed by birds and squirrels and God only knew what else was out there. Even leaving the safety of his own front door was no longer an option, not with Crowley, Ruby’s pug, prowling about. He had seen the portly animal break into a short spring and catch a baby rabbit in the front yard; Dean had quickly grabbed the dog by the scruff and shook the little creature free of its grasp, but Dean knew no one would afford him such kind treatment, and really, God help him if they did.

Sam would want to drag him from doctor to doctor worldwide, looking for some cure for what had been done to him, but Dean knew better than to allow that. He’d sooner end up with his miniaturized brain mashed into soup in a petri dish than actually have any progress on bringing him back to human size. It was easier to let Sam believe he had just taken a powder than to try and make him understand the reality of the situation. 

Dean knew he wouldn’t have long to gather what he needed to survive. He was glad that he had done some electrical work for Mrs. Tran over the time he had lived in the building, because it gave me a decent layout of the interior of the walls. There was a knothole in the board that comprised the back wall of the cabinet below his kitchen sink, just big enough for him to slip through, and he knew that a little way beyond it would be his saving grace.

The building was old and had once been a single family home in what was then an affluent neighborhood; the dumbwaiter in the wall had been used, presumably, for servants to send food and other items up to residents on different levels of the house. It had been taken out of service through several different renovations over the years, and when Dean had been checking on the electrical line that powered his garbage disposal – and he would be lying to say the thought of that little appliance didn’t give him a bit of a shiver up his spine – he had nailed in some sturdy plywood to prevent the dumbwaiter container itself, a box around a square foot in dimension, from falling down the shaft, so that he could screw the new dual control box atop it for stability.

The box would make more than an adequate home for Dean, with an ample open living area and enough empty space around it for Dean to start storing up the things he would need.

Food had been his first priority, and Dean had been glad he had abused the Sam’s Club membership he owned with his brother and bought way too much snack food, filling a lower kitchen cabinet with just about everything he would need to survive, individually packaged to boot. There were cheese and peanut butter crackers, Slim Jims, bundled packages of single serving potato chip varieties, snack cakes, fruit snacks, and just about everything Dean had ever wanted in his fourth grade lunch box but his Dad could never afford. He knew he had to put in a decent stock if he were going to last until a new tenant arrived that he could pilfer from, but Dean never expected how difficult it would be to drag the now super-sized snack foods back to his little hideout in the wall. It took him better than a week to get a decent store set away and he had more than once passed out, exhausted atop a package of Twinkies.

After he had enough food stashed away, Dean focused on tools and items of comfort. It took him some time to reach the junk drawer in his kitchen, and he was never more glad that Sam had insisted he accompany him to a free climbing class two summers before than when he found himself in his new miniscule form, scaling a stack of kitchen drawers to reach the top. Plastic twist-ties would be a staple, as were the actual loose staples he found there, rubber bands and bottle caps, thumb tacks and batteries, nail clippers and a dozen varied other tiny items that could come in useful. 

He found himself thankful that he hadn’t bothered to put away his Christmas decorations, leaving the half-packed storage box sitting in the living room; Dean grabbed a strand of white tree lights and dragged the whole thing back to his hideout, spending a day pulling out each individual bulb and cobbling together a makeshift light socket that he could tap right into power line that ran above his new home. It had taken some careful planning – and a painfully slow process in trimming the fingers of a rubber kitchen glove into a protective covering for Dean – but he had managed to give himself a light, with a stockpile of extra bulbs to boot. 

Then there was clothing, furniture, bedding… everything he would need to remain at least somewhat comfortable. He grabbed odds and ends of clothing, gloves and socks, an odd roll of thread here and there, a needle he didn’t even realize he owned, but he managed to make himself something to wear and something to sleep on. 

Dean was living as comfortably as he could, a new pest in his own wall, when he heard voices in the empty apartment and realized that he was about to have a roommate.


	4. Chapter 4

“I can’t thank you enough, Balthazar,” Castiel said, carrying his final box of belongings into his new apartment with his old friend tailing just behind, carrying a gifted houseplant. 

“It was nothing, Cassie,” Balthazar replied. He looked far too debonair for having helped Castiel move house entirely in less than six hours, blonde hair perfectly placed and unruffled, even his clothing too clean and unwrinkled for the job, but that was Balthazar all over.

If he didn’t look like he was stepping out of a penthouse party, Castiel would have been concerned.

For his part, Castiel was just relieved to be moved. He had been sneaking moving boxes into his apartment and back out into his car, only when Daphne was at work, not wanting her to have any inkling at all that he was leaving. The furniture was taken in one fell swoop that morning, with Balthazar waltzing in around noon to help take the last of the boxes, and thankfully, Daphne was none the wiser.

“I know you’d have helped me run off from a clingy girlfriend,” Balthazar teased.

Castiel rolled his eyes. The movers had placed much of the furniture where he needed it, so he busied himself pushing the last of it into the appropriate places, and getting his home work area set up. Editing textbooks for a living wasn’t the most thrilling of occupations, but it paid well and he could work from home. He didn’t like having an enclosed office, choosing instead to use the spare bedroom as a library and catch-all, placing his desk against a living room wall that afforded him a view out the front windows. 

It was just enough of a look at the outside world to remind him not to be a hermit all of the time, but not so much as to distract him when he was working.

All in all, the apartment seemed just about perfect, and he said as much aloud.

“Except for our mysterious disappearing previous tenant, was it?” Balthazar supplied in response. Castiel had to admit, the story had been somewhat intriguing and he made the mistake of sharing it with his oldest friend, who had taken to a search engine to look more into the life and times of the enigmatic Mr. Winchester.

Castiel couldn’t help but roll his eyes again, a gesture he found himself repeating with certain regularity whenever he was sharing Balthazar’s company. He crossed the living area and ducked into the kitchen. Opening the fridge, he was glad to see that the groceries he’d ordered had been delivered – and he made a mental note that he needed to, at the least, go to the store and buy his own milk and eggs on occasion – and grabbed two bottles of beer out of a chilling six-pack, handing one off to his friend.

“I’m not concerned,” Castiel told him honestly. “There’s nothing to indicate it was anything but a man breaking a lease.”

Balthazar snorted and opened his beer, tossing the cap over his shoulder; it missed the counter and clattered to the floor. “Cassie, did you look into it at all?”

Castiel blinked. “Why would I do that?” he replied.

The other man laughed. Leave it to Castiel, dear, sweet, and occasionally myopic Castiel, to find nothing strange about a disappearing former tenant who left behind a beauty of a classic car and, according to the internet articles, his entire life. 

Balthazar pulled out his smartphone and quickly pulled up an internet browser, typing in ‘Winchester disappearance’ and pulling up the page he had found the night before.

“Have a look at this, then,” he said, handing the phone over to his friend.

With a deep sigh, Castiel took the phone and scanned the page it displayed.

‘FIND DEAN WINCHESTER’ was printed in bright red lettering at the top of the white-backed page, following by a photograph of an exceedingly handsome man with dark blonde hair, smiling from the seat of a shiny black car. Castiel knew he was meant to be reading all of the print but he found himself stuck on the image, drawn in by bronzed skin speckled with sun-kissed freckles, plump, pink, and bow-shaped lips, and mossy green eyes draped in the thickest lashes Castiel had ever seen.

He let out an audible gulp and tried to ignore Balthazar’s snicker.

‘The friends and family of Dean Winchester are offering a $10,000 reward for information leading to finding him safe. Dean disappeared from his home, leaving behind his car, wallet, and phone. Foul play is expected’.

It went on to list the exact date and circumstances of the disappearance, down to the man’s sleep clothes being left piled on the kitchen floor, just as Chuck had been warning Castiel on the day he had come to view the open apartment, as well as information on the sound of a garbage disposal being heard just before the apartment was discovered empty, forcefully reminding Castiel of Chuck’s details about the bloody sink.

“How… strange,” Castiel finally relented. Glancing up from the phone, he stretched out his hand to return it to Balthazar. “But it still doesn’t sound dangerous. He may well have had some sort of psychotic break and did himself an injury, sad as it sounds.”

Balthazar’s brow knit together in concern. “His family seems pretty adamant that it’s not the case,” he replied.

Castiel laughed and opened his beer, tossing the cap back on to the counter before taking a long drink. Wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, he gestured toward Balthazar with his bottle and asked, “What are you saying, Bal? Should I be looking out for the boogeyman?”

Balthazar frowned, an uncharacteristically serious expression on the face of a man more prone towards sarcasm and mirth.

“I’m just saying be careful,” he replied. “Especially of that little minx I met on the first floor. Could spot that trouble from a mile away.”

Castiel snorted. “I think we both know that’s not going to be an issue for me.”

 

Dean’s mouth was watering. He was crouched just inside the door of the cabinet beneath the sink; it stood open perhaps a quarter of an inch when resting, and it gave him a view of two pairs of legs and some moving boxes, but it was the scent to the air that was putting his salivary glands into overdrive.

He did all right on his own, collecting cool water in bottle caps from condensation dripping down the cold water pipes, but it had been months on water alone. Maybe it was his miniaturized senses taunting him, but Dean was awash in the wonderful cool aroma of carbonated hops and yeast; his new roommate was enjoying a beer, and Dean couldn’t think of a time in his life when he was more jealous than he was in that moment.

It was a bit silly, he knew, but he simply couldn’t help it. Living on snack foods and water was helping him survive, and Dean was glad for that, but it had been months since he had a beer. Since he had a burger. Since he had a vegetable, God help him. He missed it so much, sometimes seemingly more than he missed the more important things, like friends, family, and having a life.

Dean listened to them talk, heard his own name come up now and again; he wished he could see whatever it was they were looking at, at least to get an idea of how is family was faring. Sam and their father had always butted heads, Dean serving as the buffer between the two to keep things at least somewhat calm. It had gotten better after Sam moved out and started school, and their father finally quit drinking, but they could still lock horns every now and again and Dean shuddered to think what the loss of another family member might bring about between the two.

He wondered what they thought had happened, where they thought he’d gone.

He wondered if they thought he was dead.

Dean sighed. He didn’t need that line of thinking, not now when he was about to start having to adjust to someone living in his home. For the moment, he was going to focus on what he really wanted – namely, some of that beer.

The visitor – Dean had figured out that the man wearing the dark dress slacks was not there to stay – had let his bottle cap fall, and Dean could see a decent quantity of the amber liquid puddled in the metal cap. He listened as the two talked, hoping they would wander off, and soon enough, the two men in the kitchen retreated into what had been Dean’s den, but seemed to be serving as a store room for the new tenant. 

As fast and as quietly as he could, Dean slipped out of the kitchen cabinet and darted across the linoleum floor to grab the cap, which sat as big as a pie plate in his hands. He quickly retreated to his little home in the wall, prize in hand. Dean drank the remnant beer with a meal of cheesy cracker crumbs and beef jerky; he slept better that night than he had in a long time.

 

After dining on some takeout and getting a few boxes unpacked, Balthazar bid his friend adieu and left Castiel to straighten the rest out on his own. Glad of the company but tired from the move, Castiel gave a weary sigh as he closed the door to his new home behind his friend, and moved to put their abandoned beer bottles into the kitchen sink.

When he glanced to the floor to retrieve the cap that Balthazar had dropped, he found, much to his own puzzlement, that it had disappeared.


	5. Chapter 5

“It’s still a little weird, being here,” Sam admitted. He was stretched out on the couch in Ruby’s living room, an arm tucked behind his head as Ruby made herself comfortable cuddled up to his chest. This thing between them had been building for a while and had only grown stronger since Dean had been gone. Sam knew Dean hadn’t liked Ruby, but she had been so kind in the days after Dean’s disappearance, when Sam really needed someone to lean on. His father has been swearing up and down that it had to be a demon or a vampire or some strange creature out of the old man’s demented imagination; their family friends hadn’t offered much comfort, only seemed settled in the idea of loss, that Dean was gone without a trace and not coming back.

Sam couldn’t believe that. He had to think that Dean was still out there, waiting to be found. Ruby at least didn’t put down his hopes.

Ruby sighed, and Sam felt the gentle pressure of her chest expanding and contracting against his own. She reached up with one hand and cupped his face, circling her thumb across his stubbled cheek, and Sam closed his eyes.

“I know, baby,” she purred in reply. “But it’s not so bad, is it? Just you and me, my place… nothing in here but us.”

Sam smiled down at her. Thankfully, Ruby’s apartment had a different layout than Dean’s; the building had unique floor plans for each apartment, Dean’s second floor home being the largest and the basement ‘garden’ apartment that housed Chuck the smallest. Sam had been worried that spending time in Ruby’s home would be a constant reminder of his missing brother, but with a completely changed floorplan and a wildly colorful design scheme, the apartment spoke of nothing but Ruby. Sam found that to be something he rather enjoyed.

He never quite understood what it was about her that Dean disliked so much. True, she was a little brash, a little opinionated, but that was part of what Sam liked about her. Ruby wasn’t like any other girl he’d ever dated; she spoke her mind, didn’t play coy, and made moves to get what she wanted. 

Sam had no idea how right he was. 

 

Ruby, for the most part, enjoyed the single life. She had her girls, Lilith and Tammi, and they met up at clubs every weekend, dancing, drinking, and generally causing a little havoc wherever they went. She had been keen to keep it that way, until she spotted her erstwhile neighbor’s younger brother, just days after she had moved in to her new place.   
She’d never even been one much for darker haired guys – Luc in college had made her sucker for a blonde – but for whatever reason, the moment Ruby laid eyes on Sam Winchester, she had wanted to climb him like a tree. Perhaps that was part of it, in a way; most of them men she had dated had treated her too delicately, like she might break if they so much as breathed too hard in her direction. Short of stature and slim of build, Ruby’s bombastic personality more than made up for a perceived lack of height, and she hated being treated as though she were fragile.

Sam had been polite and kind through all of their meetings, but there had been something about him that told her he wouldn’t be afraid to pick her up and toss her like a rag doll if she wanted him to – and God damn did Ruby want him to.

Dean, of course, had been a huge obstacle. The brothers were close and though they may argue – Ruby had gotten an earful from time to time, the last big blowout being over what to get their father for his birthday, of all things – they typically resolved it in due time. 

Which mean that Sam would eventually see things his brother’s way.

Which meant that Dean just had to go.

All in all, it seemed as though it had been worth the trouble, even though it had been hell putting the spell together. Ruby had known that none of her usual mind-warping brews would do; some people were just too stubborn and could eventually break through that kind of thing, and Dean definitely seemed the type. Besides, Sam would be suspicious if Dean suddenly changed his mind. No, Dean had to be removed from the equation entirely.

It was one of the few instances where Ruby knew her diminutive stature was a definite hindrance. Sam was well over six feet tall, and Dean was only a mite shorter than his younger brother, with about as much hard-packed muscle, if not as toned. Any physical attempts to get rid of him would be well outside of her reach, unless she could somehow even the playing field, and that is how her brilliant plan had been hatched.

Everything seemed to have worked out in her favor, except for moments like these, when Sam’s melancholy set in and he started thinking too much about dear departed Dean.

Well, Ruby just couldn’t have that.

She pushed herself up, sitting lightly in Sam’s lap with a knee pressed into the soft cushions of her couch on either side of his waist. Ruby paused a moment to push her long hair out of her eyes before running searching fingers down his chest, eliciting the low groan she had been looking for from the man beneath her.

“C’mon, Sam, lighten up,” she chided in a gently teasing voice. “Let’s have some fun.”

She went to rake her fingers down his chest again but found her wrists swiftly caught in one of his large hands, and began to giggle when he pulled her down into a kiss.

 

A floor above, the afternoon wasn’t faring nearly as well.

“Maybe you have mice,” Balthazar suggested for the fifth time since he had arrived, and Castiel let out what was practically an audible growl in frustration.

“I told you Balthazar, there are no mice,” he repeated, also for the fifth time that afternoon. “Mrs. Tran is militant with pest control, she has glue traps in practically every nook and cranny. Besides of which, there’s no mess, no nests, and nothing has been chewed on. Things are just… gone!”

It had become something of an epidemic. Castiel was certain he wasn’t losing his mind, though the expression on his debonair friend’s face made it clear the other man wasn’t quite so convinced. What Castiel was losing, however, were all sorts of little useless items that seemed to be there one moment and gone the next. 

He couldn’t hang on to a bottle cap to save his life, which was strange enough; Castiel was constantly setting them aside for his sister, Anna, the craft project junkie who had proclaimed herself a domestic goddess and started making everyone wine cork doormats and bottle cap charm bracelets. Then buttons were going missing, entire small spools of thread from his sewing kit, and all of the graphite from inside the mechanical pencil he used to do crossword puzzles.

It was maddening.

“Perhaps you’re just misplacing things, Cassie,” the other man suggested. “They’re all such little things you seem to have lost, they might have rolled under a piece of furniture.”

Castiel glared. “I do clean my home regularly, Balthazar,” he responded. “Did you think I wouldn’t have checked that first thing?”

With a sigh, Balthazar relaxed into the easy chair across from where Castiel sat at his desk in the living room. Much though he loved his friend, the man seemed a little high strung at times, and getting into a snit over lost buttons and misplaced bottle caps seemed a little much.

“I think you’re overreacting,” he advised.

Castiel huffed. “One of the cashmere socks that Anna gave me for my birthday is missing too.”

Balthazar arched an eyebrow. “Left it at the laundromat?” he suggested.

“They were in my dresser drawer!" Castiel replied, throwing his hands up in the air. "I hadn’t even worn them yet!"


	6. Chapter 6

If Dean were being completely honest with himself, he would admit that he was enjoying his new roommate’s exasperation just a little too much. He kept mentally insisting that he needed everything he took – even while a stack of useless buttons piled up in the corner of his little room – and that his laughter in the eventual aftermath was just a pleasant bonus.

After all, it had been some time before he had anything decent to laugh about.

In fact, with someone living in his apartment again, Dean had chance to do all sorts of things he hadn’t been able to in some time. Watching television was nice, even if the guy had a tendency to fall asleep with PBS running; Dean had seen a lot more of Antiques Roadshow than he had ever intended. He got to hear real music again, instead of the crap that Ruby had vibrating the walls most nights; it seemed Castiel had a penchant for James Taylor and 90’s alternative, which, while not Dean’s first choice, was miles better than listening to Ruby’s repeat playing of Kittie’s first album.

If Dean didn’t spend a good portion of his waking hours pretending otherwise, he might admit that the companionship, even if unknown on the part of the other man, was putting him in better spirits than he thought he could ever be in such a situation. Just having someone else around was nice, the sense of human movement in the apartment and the feeling that the space was occupied again, not vacant and stripped of furniture and all of the little touches that made it a home.

If they could just talk a little, just once in a while, Dean thought, he might be able to make do with his life as it had become.

 

Even without speaking, however, Dean was enjoying the perks. He’d used at least one of his pilfered buttons to scrape away a decent quantity of toothpaste from the tube that Castiel left lying on the bathroom counter, finally able to brush his teeth by way of a few cotton swabs with most of the fluffy cotton pulled away. It wasn’t quite perfect, but it was a start. Dean had been so focused on survival in the early days that he hadn’t put too much thought into hygiene. After a month’s time found him messily clipping away his too-long hair with the nail clippers he had squirreled away, he realized the error.

But Castiel had brought him with everything Dean could possibly need. There was toothpaste and mouthwash, sweet-scented lemon verbena soaps and tea tree oil shampoos that made quiet midnight showers beneath the bathroom tap much easier and more pleasant than they had been before, and stockpiles of tissues and cotton balls to stuff furniture as Dean made it. 

He’d fashioned a decent mattress out of a clean cashmere sock stuffed with cotton, and a bedframe from woven drinking straws and rubber bands. He had for a time just slept on whatever soft items he had taken before Sam cleaned out his own things, but he found that his aching back needed the support of something a little more stable. Dean even had a few different pieces of clothing now, sewn together from scraps, cool enough for the weather as it had begun to warm, that he could wash and hang to dry in his little room along strings of dental floss.

And of course, there was the food. Much to Dean’s considerable joy, Castiel enjoyed cooking and also habitually placed his dishes in the sink without rinsing, to be ignored until the following morning. It gave Dean leave to pick at scraps left behind, and while he initially met the idea with revulsion at eating off someone else’s leftovers, the siren call of hamburgers grilled on the balcony and a delightfully spicy marinara sauce proved to be too much. He had been cautious, at first, but had grown bold enough with time that he was picking at crumbs that were still warm on most nights. It had gotten to the point that Dean was eating better than he had when he lived on his own (and was his normal height).

The problem with how comfortable Dean had grown in Castiel’s company was that he had grown lax to the point of real carelessness. More evenings than not found him moving about in darkened corners of the same rooms where his unwitting roommate sat, or relaxing among the dust bunnies beneath a piece of furniture that the other man sat upon. It had been more than one occasion that Dean found himself nodding off, seating on the arm of the couch where the other man had already fallen asleep, lulled into slumber by the local PBS affiliate pausing their teleplay of the most recent appraisal show to remind viewers that their support was needed to keep the station on the air. 

Once, Dean had nearly been caught, perched on the pillow beside Castiel’s head and thrown among the bedclothes when the other man abruptly woke and sat up; he had been trying to read the newspaper that Castiel had strewn on the sheets on a Sunday morning, certain that the other man wouldn’t wake. He was lucky he had managed to bite back a startled yelp, or he might have been caught.

 

Dean’s favorite thing to do, though he had yet to admit it even to himself, was to listen to Castiel talk. It seemed the other man had a penchant for verbalizing his thoughts, even when alone; it made a good amount of sense to Dean, who had only seen one visitor, the smarmy Balthazar, in the apartment with Castiel. There had been a few phone calls back and forth to a short list of names that Dean began to recognize, but Castiel didn’t take any other visitors and he didn’t get out much. Talking to himself was probably a way to keep from going mad, something Dean had gotten firsthand experience in.

“I should really call Anna,” Castiel mused to himself, staring out the window alongside his desk when he was, Dean knew, supposed to be working on the final chapters of an introductory biology text for his editor. Science textbooks seemed to be Castiel’s specialty, more biology and its offshoots than anything, but a few physics and chemistry texts arriving for work now and again. Dean had found of particular interest a cryptozoology book that was more for popular pseudo-science readers than the academic circles; he sadly hadn’t been able to read as much of it over his roommate’s shoulder as he would have like, but he did spy a paragraph here and there that had words he recognized from his father’s tirades, like wendigo and sasquatch.

Dean had found, much to his surprise, that he greatly missed being able to read for leisure. He hadn’t even realized how much he had done it, before the option was taken away. He settled most days for penning his own thoughts on scraps of kitchen notepad paper with sticks of graphite from a mechanical pencil, but it didn’t do much to quell the need to read something new and interesting.

Castiel sighed and looked at his phone, sitting innocently next to the keyboard on his deck. He reached for it but paused with his hand halfway there; he knew he should call her, let her know he was doing alright, answer the same questions she asked every week, but he just didn’t feel up to it. He returned his hands to his keyboard, deciding to focus back on his work.

“I’ll call her tomorrow,” he announced to no one.

Dean gave a little sigh. He had found he rather liked Castiel, and much though it would be a detriment to his own entertainment, he had been hoping the other man would find a way to do more outside of their home. He knew that Castiel spoke to his sister, Anna, at least once a week, and she would often urge him to go out and do more, make new friends, but he always seemed resistant to the request. Dean understood that, a little bit; he had his own small circle of friends but had enjoyed the solitude of his own home more often than he cared to admit, his younger brother the only visitor and everyone else kept at bay with phone calls and emails.

It wasn’t that he was a loner or anything, he just liked being able to decompress in his own space. Castiel seemed built much the same way.

As he was typing, he muttered “Or maybe I’ll just wait for her to call me”, and Dean smiled where he sat perched on the back of the couch, hidden among the peaks and folds of the cushion and fabric.

He had found himself more and more enjoying the sound of Castiel’s voice during the time he spent with the man. It was pitched much lower than he would have expected upon first seeing the man’s face, with a raspy edge that made it downright gravelly at times. It seemed a fitting sound on the days Dean’s roommate walked about with unchecked stubble bluing his cheeks and a wild mess of unruly dark hair, but when clean-shaven and well dressed, hair combed back neatly, the voice seemed a wild contradiction to his pleasant, almost preppy look. 

Dean didn’t allow himself to think much on Castiel’s vibrant eyes that reminded Dean much of bright little blue phlox flowers that used to grow along the sides of the building, before Ruby’s dog had ripped them all up. He didn’t let himself muse on the sharp cut of Castiel’s cheekbones or the soft pink fullness of his lips. He definitely didn’t spend time pondering the jut of the man’s hips or the way the muscles in his back rolled beneath miles of gently tanned skin when Castiel stretched at night before crawling into bed.

Dean didn’t think about the warmth that would light up those hooded eyes when something made Castiel smile, or what he might have said, had he met Castiel before Ruby worked her wicked little spell on him.

And he most certainly didn’t think about all of those things when he lay in his little bed at night, trying to fall asleep with the creaks and groans of the old building settling all around him and the bleakness of his own future resting heavy on his mind.


	7. Chapter 7

“There is a relatively good chance that I am actually losing my mind,” Castiel announced to no one in particular. It was a dreary Monday afternoon, skies gone perpetually grey and drizzly some days before, and he had spent most of it watching the rain fall outside of his window and listening for the rolls of thunder.

It had been three days since he’d left the apartment; Balthazar had dragged him out to some god-awful club opening that had left him with a miserable headache pounding in his skull and the tang of cheap beer on his tongue. It would be putting it extraordinarily lightly to say that he hadn’t enjoyed the experience, though he would honestly have to admit that he appreciated his friend’s constant efforts to garner him a social life. Castiel didn’t run on quite the same mainframe as most people, though, and the few people he held close to him had never really understood that.

The quiet he could handle. The solitude was fine. He might, if the right person surfaced, take to sharing that quiet and alone time with someone else, someone who would fit into his life comfortably and not ask anything more of him, but he hadn’t quite found them yet, and he wasn’t in the grandest rush to do so.

At least not at Balthazar’s dazzling clubs, with the constant staccato of an overdrawn bass beat, nauseating flashing lights, and people just looking for an easy lay.

But none of that was even remotely involved with Castiel’s sudden claims to madness; rather, it was the peculiarities of his home, his respite from the world outside, that were driving him up the wall.

 

Balthazar still thought him overdramatic whenever Castiel tried to complain about the strange things happening in his apartment, and those he spoke to on the telephone who had yet to visit and witness any of the oddities firsthand didn’t quite seem to understand. While Balthazar insisted the issue had to be mice, particularly after some oddly shape markings began appearing in the remains of food on Castiel’s dirty dishes, Castiel just didn’t buy it.

Apart from a tendency to leave dishes in the sink, his home was spotless. He had been invited briefly into Ruby’s apartment a floor below by her giant of a boyfriend not long after he moved in, and Castiel found it just as spotless. The only real candidate for drawing in rodents with a filthy home might have been Chuck, the writer in the basement apartment whose unkempt appearance gave leave to thoughts he might have a similarly filthy home, but Castiel couldn’t believe for a moment that their landlady, Mrs. Tran, would ever allow even the smallest amount of squalor to exist on her property.

Beyond that, there were humane traps in the utilities and laundry rooms, as well as placed in the backyard; there were simply no pests getting into the building – unless one were to count Ruby’s portly pet pug, Crowley, who seemed to delight in tearing into Castiel’s attempts at gardening and using every footpath and sidewalk on the property as his own personal lavatory. 

There were still little things going missing; Castiel had been making something of a game of it, picking and choosing small items he owned to leave lying about in prominent places, waiting to see when and if they might disappear. Toothpicks were gone quickly, but the pocket change he had left on his desk was never touched. Safety pins didn’t even make it overnight, and neither did the thumbtacks, but the nail file stayed in place.

When only one of a pair of shoelaces he had purposely left sitting on his coffee table disappeared, Castiel was all but certain that whatever it was had decided to just start screwing with him.

 

He played with the idea that it might be a ghost, perhaps that of the missing Mr. Winchester. It would definitely be a sad turn of events if it were true, but the more Castiel thought on the strangeness of the case, the more likely it seemed the man must have died near to when he disappeared. And what a shame that would be; Castiel looked at the website that the man’s friends and family had created to search for him from time to time, and though there was never any new leads posted, the reward for information kept gradually increasing, near to twelve thousand dollars at that point.

Part of him romanticized the idea of a ghost sharing his space. If he were being completely honest, he never felt at all lonely there, like he had at his former apartment – obsessive neighbor notwithstanding. Sometimes it even seemed there was someone looking out for him. 

Castiel had been very upset a few weeks prior he realized he had misplaced his father’s ring. He had lost his father when he was quite young and, being the second youngest child in his family, had very little memory of the man. His mother had given him his father’s high school ring on the day of his own graduation, and he had cherished it; more often than not he wore it, even just around the house. It was comforting in a way, as though his father was still a part of his life. When he realized it wasn’t on his dresser where he usually put it at night, he had been completely dismayed.

Just the night prior, Balthazar had dragged him out – this time to a one night cooking lesson and wine-tasting event for singles – and Castiel had many a horrific vision of it having landed in his risotto alla zucca and gone home in the doggy bag of his cooking partner for the night, a charming woman named Hannah who had confided quietly over their cooking station that her own well-meaning friend had dragged her along to try and have her meet someone new following a divorce. Hannah had stressed as kindly as she could that she had gone along more or less to keep the other woman quiet, and wasn’t really looking to meet anyone; Castiel had laughed and agreed to much the same, and they’d spent an enjoyable evening in one another’s company, but the morning after had left Castiel horrified at his loss.

He had fretted over it most of the day, checking jacket and jean pockets, peeking behind his nightstand and even combing his fingers through his bedsheets to see if he had forgotten to take it off and lost it in his bed, all to no avail. When Castiel’s sister called later that evening, he had belabored the loss over the phone; when he slept that night, it was fitfully, clearly still consumed by what had happened.

And then Castiel awoke to see his father’s ring gleaming on his nightstand, sitting next to his alarm clock as though it belonged there. The tinge of dust clinging to the shining metal made it clear it must have fallen somewhere among the dust bunnies, but where? And how had it reappeared? He was mystified.

 

Even if Castiel had found a way to explain away all the strangeness he had been experiencing with objects moving and disappearing, the voices couldn’t be otherwise resolved. Rather, the voice – just one, that Castiel heard not often, but enough to make it clear he wasn’t alone. It was low and gruff, seemingly friend enough, though it never addressed him personally. Instead it seemed that its owner was talking to himself, much the way Castiel often did, all the while watching what happened in the apartment day to day.

“Dude’s gotta calm down or he’s gonna give himself an aneurysm,” he heard it say, when he was pacing during a particularly stressful telephone dispute with his editor.

Then there was the day he was reheating his own portion of leftovers from the cooking class and heard a quiet, almost wistful, “Damn that smells good.”

A relatively quiet afternoon that found Castiel tucked beneath an afghan on his couch with a book and a nasty head cold, and he nearly startled out of his seat when he heard the voice say “Christ his eyes are blue”.

And once, Castiel had found himself drawn into an evening medical drama that was more melodramatic than anything, and heard someone snort and say, “Really? A doctor seeing ghosts and she doesn’t think to get her head checked?”

 

Castiel shook his head, glancing from his window to the large empty apartment. He was all alone; it was something he used to relish, but the barest hint of someone, or even some _thing_ , sharing it with him had left him wistful and melancholy.

“I really must be losing it,” he said into the stillness.

“Nah, you’re fine,” the voice replied.


	8. Chapter 8

He had been leaning against the leg of Castiel’s couch, watching as the man stared out the window, and feeling a little forlorn at the sight of the rain. Dean hadn’t been outdoors in months, not since Ruby had worked her wicked little spell upon him; he found himself longing for the feel of the rain on his skin and for the scent of it falling upon the sidewalks. The idea of spending the rest of his life cooped up inside seemed suddenly overwhelming.

Loneliness can do strange things. Dean hadn’t even realized that he’d been speaking aloud, all the times he responded to Castiel; they were simply the thoughts occurring to him at the time, spilling from his lips in the way any solitary man might begin to speak into the quiet, if only to hear the comforting sound of their own voice. When he realized that his roommate had heard him, eyes widening to an almost comical size and turning in the direction of the sound, Dean had panicked.

His first instinct was to run, hightailing it for his little home behind the cupboard, the little prison cell he had created where he could at least feel safe. 

The idea that the sudden flurry of movement might be spied by Castiel didn’t even have time to occur to Dean as he ran. 

The other man immediately gave chase. The pounding of Castiel’s feet on the wooden floors just behind Dean was almost deafening. He had been in good shape before Ruby had worked her wicked little spell upon him, but with his diminutive size came shorter legs and smaller lungs to pull air in and out as he ran. Dean was out of breath and his heart was pounding, and he had barely made it to the kitchen.

 

Castiel’s mind kept trying to cover for what his eyes had seen, insisting over and over again that it had to be a mouse or even a rat, some rodent up on its haunches that had caught is attention and run off when it was discovered. But for all the reasoning is brain was trying to do, his eyes kept insisting upon what they had seen: a man, no taller than that imagined rodent might have been, now running for his life.

He had no thought to hurt the little creature; rather, Castiel just needed to catch up to it, to see it up close, to set his own mind at ease and have proof that he wasn’t going mad at all, that there was something there, that there was someone there. It dashed around the corner and into the kitchen, Castiel following closely, desperate to catch it up but tempering his gait to avoid moving to forward to fast and perhaps injuring the little thing in the process. 

The cabinet door beneath the kitchen sink was open just the slightest bit and Castiel realized that the creature was making directly for the outlet; he would have to trap it, but was still worried he might hurt it if he moved too fast or grabbed with his bare hands.

Heart pounding a taut rhythm in his chest, Castiel glanced wildly around his kitchen for something that could aid him in capturing the curious little creature. There was little that could help him; the toaster, the overpriced pod coffeemaker that Balthazar had brought over as a housewarming gift, canisters for sugar and flour… Then his eyes lit upon just the sort of thing he had been looking for. Castiel had made pasta for dinner the night before, and done the dishes that morning, leaving them to dry in the plastic drying rack on the countertop. Sitting atop the pile was a colander.

Quick as he could, Castiel grabbed the white plastic piece of kitchenware and slammed it down on the ground, right over the little creature as it tried to run. His chest was heaving as he righted himself and stood, staring down and wondering what on earth he would do next. After a long beat, the plastic colander began to scraped against the floor, moving forward a centimeter or two; whatever was caught inside was trying to escape. Castiel took a heavier ceramic coffee mug from his strainer and gently placed it on top of the colander, careful that it should only hold the lighter piece in place and not crush it inward. When it was clear that it was holding, he took a step back and sighed.

 

Castiel’s logical mind told him that he’d simply caught a rat. It had looked far too big to be a mouse, and all of the other little details that had astounded him in that first split second viewing could easily have been filled in by a disquieted, lonely mind.

Perhaps Balthazar had been right all along.

Perhaps Castiel was spending too much time alone, his subconscious fabricating gruff-voiced responses to his spoken thoughts and actions to provide some much-needed socialization.

Perhaps he was just so alone that he fantasized being looked after by the unfortunate spirit of a man he’d never met.

Castiel’s shoulders slumped and he leaned against the counter with a sigh. He knew there was much in the world that he would never truly understand and far more out there than science could ever prove, but sometimes he had to cede to fact that the simplest answer was usually the right one. 

He had just resigned himself to the fact that he was going to have to find some sort of box or cage to put the creature in until he could find a place to release it when he heard it, that same voice.

“Hey, c’mon man. You can’t just leave me in here.”

Castiel startled and grabbed for the silverware in the drying rack, holding aloft the first slim metal handle he touched as though to protect himself; immediately he felt foolish, remembering that the little creature, speaking or not, hadn’t done anything to harm him during his time living in the apartment.

He felt doubly foolish a few seconds later, realizing he had been preparing to defend himself with a novelty spatula shaped like a bumblebee; that too had been a housewarming gift, though it had arrived by post from his older brother, Gabriel, a man with a very strange sense of humor.

Groaning at his own folly, Castiel tossed the spatula into the sink and resigned himself to do what he knew he must: actually get a glimpse of whatever it was he caught. He knelt to the floor on hands and knees, ducking down to peer into the colander through the slats used to drain out water. He squinted a moment before his vision focused and Castiel’s eyes widened with a gasp.

Dark blonde hair, messy and longer than he probably preferred it; freckled skin, paler now without the kiss of the sun, too much time spent indoors, most likely hiding. A pink, bow-shaped mouth, mossy green eyes, all like Castiel had seen in photographs on the website his brother had created to further the search for the missing man, only shrunken down to a diminutive size that Castiel would not have believed if he hadn’t seen it with his own two eyes. He swallowed hard, his brow furrowed as he struggled to understand just how this could be possible.

“Hello, Dean,” he finally spoke.

The other man grinned from the confines of his plastic prison. “Hey Cas,” he replied.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, I know, it's a trope for this fandom, but I don't care, it's my _favorite_ one and I will use it to death.


	9. Chapter 9

Dean supposed he should be concerned at how quickly they both normalized the situation, but it was hard to care when he was seated on a stack of coasters, eating dinner from saucer held at table-height for him by an overturned coffee cup. Better still, it was a burger – an honest god ground chuck charcoal grilled burger, made just the right size for his current frame, piled with bits of cheese and lettuce and even grilled slivered onion. The bun had been a bit of a problem, but Castiel had meticulously cut the perfect size and shape from a larger one, trimming it down so it wouldn’t leave Dean with wads of bread for a bite of burger.

Dean could have wept for the beauty of it.

“I gotta tell ya,” Dean said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, “I was pretty happy to see you movin’ in. Another week living on water and cheese crackers, and I was gonna lose it.”

Castiel chuckled and reached to tip his beer into Dean’s waiting cup, the meticulously cleaned cap off of an old tube of toothpaste. Dean toasted him in thanks before taking a long drink, and Castiel repeated the same motion before responding.

“I can only imagine,” he relented. “It can’t have been very healthy. It’s amazing you even thought to gather up supplies like that. I think I’d have been too busy losing my mind to put any thought into the future.”

Dean turned a pleased shade of pink and shrugged. “Had it rough for a while as a kid, guess I just picked up that whole survival drive back then.”

“I do wish you had been a bit more upfront about it,” Castiel told him. “I was beginning to really question my sanity there for a time.”

Dean snorted. “You tellin’ me if I just popped up on day one, you wouldn’t have run outta here screaming?

Castiel frowned. “Well I don’t think I would have been screaming,” he scoffed, earning a laugh from his diminutive dinner mate. 

“Look, man, I didn’t even mean to get found out like this,” Dean told him, still chuckling the slightest bit. “Took me a while to stop freakin’ out myself, who knew what someone else might do? Kept thinkin’ I’d end up in some laboratory cage somewhere or cut into eight pieces under a microscope or something.”

“You weren’t doing a very good job of hiding, Dean,” Castiel pointed out with the tiniest of smirks. Dean couldn’t help but notice how it lit his eyes with mirth, and did his very best not to smile in return.

“Hey, I was doing awesome,” he replied with a put-upon glare. “You’re the one who kept talkin’ to nobody, had to expect me to answer at some point.”

Castiel sighed and leaned back in his seat, a small smile playing upon his lips. Only a few hours ago he had been questioning his sanity, and now he sat sharing an enjoyable meal with his apparent long-term roommate, who happened to be only a few inches tall. It was surreal, but he had pinched himself enough to know it was grounded in reality. 

What an odd day it had been.

“Dean,” he asked, speaking carefully as he parsed his coming words, “What… what happened to you?”

Dean sighed and set down his cup. He lowered his gaze, running his fingers back through his newly shorn hair; Castiel had been kind enough to give him a trim earlier in the day, using a pair of cuticle scissors. 

“You’re gonna think its nuts,” Dean warned, and Castiel snorted.

“What could possibly make me think that at this point?” Castiel countered, gesturing towards his new friend with his beer bottle.

Dean gave a low laugh. “S’pose you’re right,” he relented, and then sighed. “So, you met Ruby, right? Chick who lives on the first floor?”

Castiel attempted not to grimace at mention of his unsavory neighbor, but failed. “Yes, I have.”

“She was a pain in the ass since she moved in but I really didn’t give a shit so long as we stayed out of each other’s way, you know?” Dean told him, taking another bite of his miniature burger. Every time he tasted it, he’d shake his head and let out a grateful little groan of appreciation that Castiel did his best to ignore, as it sounded almost pornographic.

“Of course,” Castiel agreed. “That is my policy as well.”

“And it would’ve been fine if she hadn’t kept trying to get her hands on my little brother,” Dean went on, shaking his head at the thought of it. “Bad enough she’s always trying to get her claws hooked into Sam, then she goes and t-bones my Baby, and…”

“Wait, did you say Sam?” Castiel interrupted, brows raised at mention of the name. He had only met Ruby’s boyfriend once or twice, but he remembered distinctly that the man had been called Sam. “Tall, longish brown hair?”

Dean nodded slowly. “Yeah…” he said.

“I’m sorry to tell you this, Dean, but I believe I’ve met your brother. He’s Ruby’s boyfriend, so far as I could tell,” Castiel told him.

Dean jumped off his coaster-stack seat and swore, kicking at a nearby fork in frustration. 

“Son of a bitch!” he growled, unable to keep his rage tucked away. It was bad enough that Ruby had played her little magic trick on him, but Dean had been able to look on the bright side, thinking that if he were gone, at least Sam wouldn’t have an excuse to visit the building any longer and would remain out of Ruby’s clutches. He’d always had a bad feeling about the woman, but it was clear it was far worse than he imagined, and now Sam was in the line of fire.

“Ruby… she did this to you?” Castiel pressed gently. He could see how upset Dean was with the news, but he hadn’t finished explaining his situation. After all, how could Castiel find a means to help if he didn’t know the whole story?

“Yeah,” Dean replied bitterly, fisting his hands at his sides to keep from punching something. “She fucked up my car and I told her I was done with it, I was tellin’ Sammy was a crazy bitch she was and that’d be the end of it. Next thing I knew, I woke up and she’s in my kitchen, throwin’ some gunk in my face and then… well then, here I was. Elf-sized.”

“And she just left you?” Castiel asked, frowning. “Small or not, you’re still in full possession of your faculties, she had to think that would be a problem.”

Dean snorted. “She thinks she dropped me down the garbage disposal. My moose of a brother was pounding on the door and she took off so she didn’t get caught. Didn’t even use a door, just kinda walked off and disappeared, like some kind of…”

“Witch,” Castiel filled in, nodding. He sighed. “I’d suspected as much. That dog of hers is too intelligent to be a normal animal, he must be a familiar.”

Dean stared in surprise; he had expected a certain amount of disbelief from Castiel, his current condition notwithstanding, but it seemed he had no need to convince the other man of anything.

“A witch, yeah,” Dean agreed, nodding slowly. “You… you know about this stuff?”

Castiel leaned forward and took a long pull on his beer before nodding, clasping his hands together on the tabletop.

“I do,” he agreed. “I’m not a practitioner myself, but I may know someone who can assist you, Dean. She’s in New York at the moment but should be back in a few weeks.”

Dean arched an eyebrow. “Old girlfriend?” he asked.

Castiel snorted. “Old friend,” he corrected. “While I greatly enjoy Meg’s company, I can’t help but think anything romantic between us would be something of a disaster. And I really wouldn’t want to get on her bad side.”


	10. Chapter 10

Meg was standing with one black leather boot pressed across the throat of a tall, thin, wheezing man named Alistair who lay flat on his back on the cracked concrete floor when her phone chirped and buzzed in her pocket. She sighed heavily and rolled her eyes, easing up the pressure on the sole of her foot to let the sleaze underfoot get a few breaths in, and pulled her smartphone from her pocket.

A local cop and an FBI agent by the name of Henriksen stood nearby in the old abandoned warehouse, watching but saying nothing. They had worked with Meg before, and knew better than to interrupt her process.

“Huh,” she said aloud, reading the email that had been sent her way. She hadn’t heard from Castiel in a few weeks, not since she made the trip to New York on… business. She had planned on grabbing a drink with him when she returned home, if she could pry him out the front door of his apartment, but certainly hadn’t expected to hear from him beforehand.

With an intriguing little problem to boot.

She punched out a quick response and slipped her phone into her back pocket before leaning down and smiling at the man she held underfoot.

“Now Alistair,” she said, voice sweet and lilting. “I’ve already bound your powers. Why don’t you tell the nice policemen where you hid the bodies, and you can go to jail for the rest of your life? Or you can face the alternative.”

The man coughed and sputtered, swearing until Meg increased the pressure and he cried out, finally beginning to spill his secrets. He confessed to nine murders, more than enough to put him behind bars for life; with his magic thoroughly broken, he’d be no threat to anyone, and Meg could collect part of her bounty.

There were four more in his coven to bring in before she could return home.

 

“Meg looks to be away for some time,” Castiel announced with a sigh, peering at the open email on his computer screen. Dean stood near to Castiel’s hand where it gripped his computer mouse, casually studying the fine lines and thin hairs of the other man’s knuckles while he perused the web.

Not for the first time, Dean found himself reaching to shove hands into pockets he didn’t have on the short pants that had once been the fingers of a pair of gloves. He sighed and settled for crossing his arms over his chest, bare since the last shirt he had cobbled together had fallen apart.

“I guess I can stand being ‘fun size’ a while longer,” he offered with a sigh.

Castiel glanced over and gave him a sympathetic smile; after a moment he squinted, cocking his head to the side as though in thought, and then smiled again, this time more broadly. Dean couldn’t help but smile in return.

“We could at least do something to make you a bit more comfortable until then,” Castiel replied, and quickly pulled up a web browser and began typing.

 

The first box arrived within a few days; Castiel rushed in with a huge gummy grin on his face, a brown package the size of a shoebox tucked under his arm. Dean had been waiting patiently, stretched out on a throw pillow that Castiel had placed in just the right position on the couch for Dean to view the television and see out the windows without having to climb anywhere.

“Dean,” Castiel called excitedly, “I’ve got something here for you.”

Dean immediately perked up; Castiel had been intent on making Dean’s days as a fraction of his former self at least bearable, if not all together pleasant. He had been making sure to cut smaller portions out of every meal he cooked to share with his pint-sized roommate and doled out drink in thimble-sized containers he had scrounged up; the two spent their entire day together, before one would retire to bed, and it had been just the night before that Dean had fallen asleep on the pillow opposite Castiel’s in the presently taller man’s bed.

In spite of the strangeness of the situation, Dean felt safe enough not to hide anymore, and it was a great relief, as well as a welcome respite from the forced solitude.

“Whatcha got?” Dean asked curiously, sitting up. 

Castiel had snagged a butter knife in the kitchen to split the packing tape on the box and presented it to Dean already open, the cardboard flaps pulled aside to display the treasures inside. One look had Dean laughing, deep belly laughs that had Castiel smiling in return, even if he didn’t understand the source of the humor.

“Do you not like them?” Castiel asked, puzzled.

“Are you kidding, Cas?” Dean replied, climbing up the side of the box and diving right in. There were t-shirts and dress shirts, shorts and pants, some printed to resemble denim and others in plastic, but most plain cotton printed in varying shades; they fastened with Velcro and snap-buttons, tiny to most hands but still large to Dean’s miniaturized hands. “This is awesome! Where did you even find this stuff?”

Castiel blushed ever so slightly, clearly pleased by Dean’s praise. “Doll clothes superstore, dot com,” he replied with a smile, and Dean laughed. Castiel moved forward and sat gingerly beside the box while Dean still pulled at the piles of doll clothing.

“All of the shoes they had were plastic, I’m afraid,” Castiel went on. “And they don’t really have sizing options. I thought we’d wash all of this in fabric softener tonight and by tomorrow, you’ll have a whole new wardrobe.”

 

Dean could count on one hand the number of times in his life that the universe had done him a good turn; he had a great kid for a little brother, an awesome car, and one hell of a surrogate family, but beyond that, very little had gone well for him.

He’d lost his mother very young, been subject to the drunken ramblings of a paranoid father (though perhaps not quite as paranoid as Dean had always thought) who had still been struggling through post-traumatic stress from his days as a Marine when he lost his wife to a violent death. There was never a lot of money and even less kindness from strangers who took one look at Dean’s hand-me-down clothes and the flippant attitude he wore as a shield from the world and all its ills, made their snap judgements and moved on. He had fought a hard path to get where he was, putting himself and his brother through school, finding a decent job after graduating, even hitting graduate school, but it had never been easy.

There hadn’t been any luck involved, just a lot of hard work and perseverance. And a few ill winds still managed to blow his way, break-ins at shoddy apartments, laptops stolen out of cars, once even getting mistaken for a lookalike who was wanted for murder, landing Dean in a holding cell for 48 hours until he could prove that he wasn’t the guy they were looking for. All in all, Dean figured that the only luck he had was bad luck, and he’d just have to try and get around it as best he could. This whole thing with Ruby had certainly proved that point.

 

And then there was Cas. A nice guy, quiet and a little nerdy, but smart as a whip with a ridiculous, sneaky deadpan sense of humor that often caught Dean off guard, drawing out a bark of laughter that would make the other man flash a pleased, gummy smile. If anyone had to be his forced roommate, Dean definitely thought he could have done worse, and that was before Castiel made it his mission to make Dean’s days as a fun-size human as comfortable as possible.

Now Dean had clothes to wear – some of it a little silly but still, real clothes, that actually fit, and cups and plates to eat and drink from. Castiel always made Dean-sized portions of whatever he cooked and the two took nearly every meal together, Dean once getting embarrassingly tipsy on barely a thimble full of a local craft brew. He didn’t have to hide anymore; he was home again.

Dean was starting to think that, for all of the bad luck he had endured, he might just be getting the payoff.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies for the delays. A little hinky in the brainpan as of late.

**Author's Note:**

> Follow me on [Tumblr](http://literatec.tumblr.com), if you wish.
> 
> Please do not add this, or any of my posted works, to Goodreads. Thank you.


End file.
